He-Lion
Lions sleep for 20-22 hours a day, so you have to make the most of any opportunities you get…!
Sol y Sombra (Sun and Shade)
Shadows can either be your enemy or your friend - you just have to know how to use them. If you don’t shoot with the sun directly behind you, then there’s a risk that you’ll get more shadows on the animal and that they’ll be a distraction, making it harder to see its facial features and unnecessarily complicating the image.
However, if you get the chance to shoot an animal that’s in the sun but with deep shadows behind, then you should be able to take a shot like the one above. The difference between the bright and dark elements make the lighting very dramatic, and that’s what you want to make a great image.
This is one type of shot where the exact settings you use are not that important. Yes, you need a fast enough shutter speed to freeze the animal, and it’s probably easier to take this kind of photograph with a long lens so that you can avoid any distractingly bright elements in the background, but the ISO doesn’t matter, and the aperture doesn’t matter as the background is going to be black anyway.
The only thing you might want to do is to dial in a stop or two of negative exposure compensation. If your subject is lit by direct sunlight, then it’s unlikely that it will ever be too dark, so you can afford to underexpose the shot in order to make sure that the background is as dark as possible.
You can always ‘do it in post’, but I’m a big fan of getting the settings right in camera because the image will be faster to process and the quality of the image won’t be compromised by making dramatic changes in Lightroom. I didn’t remember to underexpose this shot, so my punishment was having to spend hours cloning out dozens of leaves and blades of grass in Lightroom…!
Mating
“No means no!”
I was lucky enough to work for four months in 2019 as the Resident Photographer at various &Beyond and Cottar’s safari camps in Tanzania and Kenya, and another stroke of luck came along when I was at Klein’s Camp.
A few nomadic male lions had recently taken over the Black Rock/Kuka Hills pride, and they had done what they always do, which is to chase away the other males and kill their cubs. As a result, the lionesses quickly came on heat, and I was able to see 29 lion matings while I was there!
Lions mate according to a very predictable pattern: once they’ve started, they continue mating at intervals of 10-20 minutes for a week - without even stopping to hunt or eat. That pretty much guarantees conception, but it also guarantees photographers a great chance to document the action.
Most mornings when I was at Klein’s Camp, we’d go out and see lions mating, so I swiftly learned the ropes. I even used to set a timer on my iPhone so that I’d be ready for the next mating!
The first thing to say about shooting lions mating is that the actual mating shots can be a little bit dull. Each mating only takes around 10-30 seconds, and there isn’t much movement on the part of the male or female.
The female typically initiates proceedings by walking a few metres away from the male, often creeping around low to the ground in what I imagine she must think is a ‘seductive’ manner before finally lying down and presenting her rump to her partner. The lions will then mate for a few seconds, and the most interesting part of that is usually when the male bites the neck and/or ears of the female.
However, the shot that you really want to get is the one just after the male has finished. The penis of the male lion is barbed, so the lioness feels pain when he withdraws it. As a result, she usually lashes out, and the two lions roar angrily at each other. In the case of the shot above, the lioness even slapped the male, and I was lucky enough to capture her paw raised and ready to strike!
If you want to capture this kind of shot, there are three things you have to remember:
Get in the right position, ideally ahead of the lions or a bit to the side. That gives you the best chance to get shots of the expressions of the animals during mating and also and fisticuffs afterwards. That means liaising with your driver very closely. Everything happens so quickly that the driver has to be prepared to move at a moment’s notice and know exactly where to position the vehicle. I remember ‘coaching’ a couple of my drivers at Klein’s Camp, making sure that the engine was running well in advance and telling them exactly where to go. It didn’t always work, but it’s important at least to try.
Use a fast enough shutter speed. It may seem like nothing much is happening when the lions are mating. They’re almost motionless, so it would be tempting to think that a fast shutter speed just isn’t necessary. That would be a big mistake! The moments after the mating is over are full of frantic activity, but they only last for a few seconds. It would be such a shame to ruin a perfect shot of a catfight with motion blur, so you have to be at at least 1/1000 of a second. The shutter speed for this shot was only 1/500, so I was very lucky…!
Use a narrow aperture. As I say, the action comes thick and fast, so you can’t always guarantee that the lions will be in the perfect position for the ‘money shot’ at the end. That means you have to use at least f/8 or f/11 just to give yourself enough ‘wiggle room’ when it comes to depth of field. Yes, that means you might get a bit of unwanted detail in the surrounding grass, but it maximises your chances of getting the faces sharp at the crucial moment.
Cute Cubs
“Bundle…!”
I spent a few weeks in Ndutu in 2019, and I was lucky enough to be there when two lionesses had four cubs each, making eight in total! They were sisters, and they had their litters within 24 hours of each other, so the cubs were almost exactly the same age, and they allowed them to breast-feed from either of them.
We generally saw them beside the marshes around sunset, and when I took this particular shot, one of the mothers was being mobbed by just about all the cubs! “Cute sells,” as they say, so I took as many pictures as I could!
The only problem was that they were a long way away, and it was getting pretty dark, so I had to make some difficult trade-offs with my settings.
Fortunately, I had an 800mm lens with a 1.25x teleconverter with me, so distance wasn’t so much of a problem. However, there just wasn’t enough light for what I wanted to do.
I wanted a narrow aperture to get all the cubs acceptably sharp, and I wanted a fast shutter speed to avoid motion blur (especially as my focal length was 1000mm!), but that left the ISO at 2000. That was bearable, I supposed, but I had to clean up the image A LOT in Topaz Labs’ DeNoise AI for it to look even half-decent…
A View to a Kill
Three’s A Crowd
For me (and for a lot of people), seeing a kill is the ultimate thrill while on safari, but they don’t come along very often - particularly lion kills. I’d been on five African safaris before going to Klein’s Camp in 2019, and I’d never seen a kill, so I was getting very impatient. Fortunately, I wasn’t disappointed…
When a couple of guests and I drove to the Serengeti National Park, we witnessed one of the most spectacular kills you’ll ever see. Our driver had stopped the jeep to scan for wildlife, and he suddenly called out, "There's a lion fighting with a buffalo!"
It was a couple of hundred yards away, and we weren't allowed to go off-road, but that didn't stop him!
We hurtled over the bumpy savannah, and at one point my bean bag flew into the air. I was just glad that I was hanging on to my cameras for dear life, otherwise they would probably have gone out the window!
When we reached the scene, a male lion had the hindquarters of the buffalo in his teeth and was grappling it from behind. I started taking pictures, and I took so many on continuous that it was too much for my poor camera’s buffer, and the frame rate dropped dramatically!
I suggested to one of the guests to take some video, so she took care of that while I machine-gunned away, desperate not to miss a moment of the action.
Finally, another three male lions joined in the kill, and they managed to bring the buffalo down. One of them applied the coup de grâce by suffocating it, first by biting it round the neck and then over its mouth. When it was dead, the lions all lined up behind the carcase as they began to feed.
We could't stay long as the driver was worried about being spotted by the park rangers, so we hightailed it out of there. Finally! A proper lion kill. What a day...!
Lions generally hunt at night, so you have to be pretty lucky to see a kill. I at least had the benefit of being able of a four-month stay in Africa, which improved my chances no end - as I thought! - but I still only saw two ‘proper’ kills during my entire trip! There’s no way to guarantee seeing a kill, of course, but there are a few things you can do to even up the odds.
Ask your guide to take you to see the lions. Most drivers or guides will know exactly where the local lion pride tends to be, so it’s worth asking to swing by. You’ll usually see them lying down in the shade - particularly in the early mornings - but you might want to hang out with them for a while just in case. You can fill your time taking a few nice portraits, and then at least you’ll be in the right place if they start to hunt. That may take a few hours, though, so you might need to have a few awkward conversations with the other guests!
Go on a night drive. This is one way of improving your chances of seeing a kill. You might not be able to take any pictures, but seeing a kill is better than not seeing one, right?! Not every safari lodge is allowed to provide night drives, so you’ll have to check in advance. Generally, they’re not permitted in the national parks in Africa, so you’ll have to go to a lodge on a private conservancy, such as Klein’s Camp.
Get ready! Your choice of lens and your choice of settings will go a big way towards deciding the quality of pictures you get if you do happen to see a kill. For this shot, my 80-400mm was good enough to give me the range I needed because the lions were literally only around 15-20 yards away, but at other times I’ve had to use my 800mm lens, which produces incredibly sharp images but is impossible to handhold, and that’s not ideal when you’re trying to capture rapid action sequences. In terms of your settings, you’ll need to have a fast shutter speed of around 1/2000 of a second (unless you’re brave enough to try a slow pan!) and an aperture of f/8 or so to give you a little bit of a margin for error when it comes to depth of field. (I took this shot at 1/250 and f/11.) You’ll also need to make sure your camera’s autofocus is set to continuous (AF-C 3D for Nikon, AI Servo for Canon) so that it will constantly update as the animals race around.
Don’t forget video. One of the guests who saw this lion kill with me had an iPhone, and I suggested she take some video footage. She kindly sent all the clips to me afterwards, and four of them have now had more than a million views on YouTube…!
Kopjes (Rocky Outcrops)
“Give me a lion - on the rocks!”
One of the joys of spending time in the Serengeti is seeing lions on the local ‘kopjes’ or rocky outcrops. The more time you spend as a wildlife photographer, the more you realise that it’s all about the background. The animals don’t change, so you simply have to find somewhere where you can show them off to best advantage.
The kopjes are useful, then, because they offer something different. Everyone’s seen pictures of lions online in a ‘typical’ savannah scene, with the grassland stretching for miles into the distance, but how many shots have you seen like this one?
The rocks gave me a chance to differentiate this shot from most of the others you’re likely to see, and that’s half the job of the photographer: we have to try to be original. It’s not always easy, but it’s always better to experiment with a novel and interesting backdrop than to take pictures that others have taken a thousand times before….
Finally, if these tips help you can come away with a few good shots of lions on your next safari, then I’ll be very happy.
Good luck…!
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